


lean back now, lean back and breathe

by emkayss



Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: (evak is in chapter 2 btw), Canon Compliant, Coming Out, Gen, M/M, divorce & long distance sibling relationships & coming out: the fic, sibling fic! (not incest lol)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-30 06:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12647787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emkayss/pseuds/emkayss
Summary: “It’s 2015.” Isak says it like it’s an explanation. “You can’t be a renaissance man in 2015.”“Isak,” Lea says, her voice dipping into something a bit more serious, a bit more real. It doesn’t match the way her room feels, small and contained with only the light of her desk lamp. “It’s 2015. You can be whatever the fuck you want to be.”Or, the one where Lea Valtersen is the badass older sister we all wish we had.





	lean back now, lean back and breathe

**Author's Note:**

> me: i'm going to write wlw skam fic next
> 
> also me: writes 10k for a character that doesn't exist 
> 
> this fic is a two parter, kinda split in half. chapter 1 deals with lea and isak's parents separation and isak moving out up until the summer before season 3, and chapter 2 deals with isak coming out and even's featured pretty heavily in it too. chapter 2 is pretty much written, but i am the slowest writer on the planet and it will likely be a few weeks until its posted, but i will post it! i promise!
> 
> title is from life itself by glass animals

It makes sense, at this time of year, for the light to be half gone by dinner. 

The light is gone, now, and it happened slowly enough Lea doesn’t notice it's dark until — suddenly, as if out of nowhere — it is. She doesn’t bother to get up to turn the ceiling light on, just stretches her arm up so she can flick the lamp on beside her bed. The black of her room is suddenly lifted, harsh angles bathed in soft white light. Lea has to blink against it, not because it’s bright but because she’s _tired,_ all of the sudden, and her eyes don’t want to stay open. 

“How dark is it in Oslo?”

She’s glad her phone’s on speaker; she doesn’t know if she has it in her to hold onto it right now. It’s resting somewhere on the pillow, close to her head, so it sounds like Isak is right beside her when he answers, “Pretty dark.” 

Lea rolls her eyes. “It’s a wonder you're passing your literature class.” 

He makes a kind of half affronted noise and Lea laughs. “You’re biased,” he says. “You’re studying this stuff. I’m good at, like, science.” 

“You can be good at more than one thing. You can be a renaissance man.” 

“It’s 2015.” Isak says it like it’s an explanation. “You can’t be a renaissance man in 2015.”

“Isak,” Lea says, her voice dipping into something a bit more serious, a bit more real. It doesn’t match the way her room feels, small and contained with only the light of her desk lamp. “It’s 2015. You can be whatever you want to be.” 

Isak laughs at that, and Lea can’t help but laugh too. It’s easy, laughing with him when he’s so far away in Oslo. Lea’s four years older than him, has lived away from him for a handful of years now. She’s used to being on her own, loves it in fact. She’s cultivated a family in London just as important as the one back at home. 

She's almost as tall as Isak, though her hair is darker and straighter and falls just above her shoulders. They have the same nose, though, upturned just a bit and have the same shape to their lips. 

It's obvious they're siblings when they're standing next to each other; they look so similar people had mistaken them for twins as they grew up and the four year age gap grew less obvious. But they haven't been beside each other for a while now. Lea left Oslo for London for university the second she was done with high school. She goes back home, sure, for Christmas and during the holidays, but Oslo is starting to feel less and less like home every time she goes back. 

And she's okay with it. She has a life in London now, she has school to go to and a social life and friends to keep up with, and she comments on her brother’s Instagram photos sometimes and Skypes him once in a while, texts him memes he’d think are funny and that's it. It's okay. It works.

It’s not like UiO wasn’t good enough, or something. It’s just… living at home and seeing the same people all the time felt a lot like high school, and she’s supposed to be done high school. Supposed to be done with stupid drama and stupid friend groups. So she applies in London, because she can and because she wants to. She gets in and she works over the summer and it’s going to be hard and it’s gonna cost a lot, but she does it anyway. 

And it all works. Her first year is uneventful, except for everything that comes with moving not just to another city, but to another country. The language is different, the culture and customs are different. But Lea’s got it all under control. She makes it through relatively unscathed. Things have started to go sour back at home, with her mother’s illness and her parents’ marriage; half of her feels guilty for running away from all of it, for leaving Isak there to deal with it all of it himself. The other half feels some kind of immense, overwhelming relief to be out of there. 

Tonight, she says goodnight to Isak and he says goodnight back and then they hang up and Lea lays on her bed, staring at the ceiling until her eyes go fuzzy with the dark. 

.

Her phone goes off one night while she’s making dinner with Scott, an international relations student she had a bunch of classes with in first year and moved in with in second. They started spending time together outside of class, studying, getting coffee, taking Lea out to see the sights of London, and then when the time came to find a place to live for the next year, they started looking together. So, this year, they’re living together with another girl, Tilly, who they found online and goes to the same university.

Tonight, Lea is cutting up carrots for vegetarian chilli when she feels her phone vibrating in her back pocket. She wipes her hand on a tea towel and pulls her phone out, frowning when she sees Isak’s name. He’s not usually the one to call her. 

“One second,” she tells Scott, and puts the phone up to her ear. _“Hei,_ Isak?”

And it all comes out. 

Isak’s not crying, but his voice is shaking in a way that sounds like he just was, and he’s talking so, so fast. Lea tells him to slow down, tells him it’s going to be fine. Tells him she’ll be on the next plane back to Oslo. 

She hangs up and sits down in a kitchen chair.

“Hey,” Scott says, softly, kneeling down in front of her. “That was your brother?” 

He doesn’t press at all, just takes her hands in his and holds. 

“Yeah. My — um.” She swallows. Takes a second to let everything settle and for the words to crawl their way up their throat. “Isak called to tell me our dad left. He packed up all of his stuff and left.” 

“Lea,” Scott says, and that’s it. Lea looks down into her lap.

“I have to book a flight back home. Isak’s by himself. He’s — fuck. He’s all by himself.” 

Scott holds on to her when she brings her hands up to her face, her shoulders drawing up into themselves as she starts to cry. He wraps his arms around her waist and presses his face into her lap and soon enough Lea is just sniffling and she’s stroking the hair on the back of Scott’s head. 

They stay there for a couple minutes more. “You book your flight. I’ll finish the chili,” Scott says, after a while, without moving his face. 

“Okay,” says Lea. 

Scott moves to stand up and he pulls Lea up with him. He smiles at her, and presses his forehead to hers for second before pulling away. 

Lea isn’t on the _next_ flight, exactly, because that’s basically impossible, but she’s opening the front door to her parent’s (or just mom’s?) house just after noon the next day.

Her mom’s slippers aren’t at the front door, so she must be home. Somewhere. Lea takes off her boots and calls, “Mom? Isak?” There’s no answer. She heads to Isak’s room first, which is a decision she didn't want to make. His door is ajar. And he’s asleep, Lea sees when she steps in, tucked into the far corner of his bed, pressed up against the wall. She goes over and sits on the edge of the bed and Isak immediately stirs. He flops over — his chest and shoulders moving like they haven’t been used in days — so he’s on his back, one of his arms tucked awkwardly under a shoulder blade.

“Hi,” he says, finally. After a second. He looks so tired, so sad, so _done,_ and Lea doesn’t know what she can do about it. 

“How are you doing?” 

Isak shrugs, or does the best imitation of a shrug as one can when horizontal. “I don’t know. I feel kind of numb.” 

Lea nods. “I get that. How’s mom?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really, you know…” He trails off. 

Lea nods, again. “I’ll talk to her.” 

“Thank you,” Isak says. He _sounds_ so tired, too, and somehow both so much older and so much younger than he is. 

Isak sits up suddenly, and Lea watches as he rearranges his arms and falls back onto his pillow. He breathes in, slow, and out again, slow. Like he’s trying to keep himself composed. 

Lea stands — and she can tell by the way Isak’s eyebrows lift he thinks she’s leaving — and lifts the corner of the duvet, a silent question. Isak nods, once, barely, and Lea takes it, climbing under the covers with him.

They kind of just lay there, not even touching in Isak’s wide bed. Isak is asleep again within fifteen minutes, shifting so he’s on his side rather than his back. His mouth parts a bit in his sleep and the tension in his face — the way his eyebrows are drawn together and the pinch of his lips — releases. He looks relaxed. At peace. 

The sound of Lea’s phone ringing is piercing even on vibrate, the sound of it so loud in the silence of Isak’s room and the silence of the house, and Isak is immediately moving, jolting, sitting up, rubbing his hand over his face and through his hair. They make eye contact and Isak almost looks panicked. 

“It’s fine,” Lea says, resting her hand on his shoulder and almost pushing him back into bed. “It’s just a friend from school.” 

Isak nods, quickly, settling back into his pillow. He stares blankly up at the ceiling while Lea tells Scott that yes, she got to Oslo okay, and Isak’s doing fine, and she’s doing fine, and everything will be fine _._ They talk for a little bit longer before they hang up. 

“Who was that?” Isak asks. He’s on his side now, watching her. 

“This guy I live with. Scott.” She does her best to pronounce Scott the way all her English friends do.  _Scott._

Isak nods, slowly, and they’re silent again. Lea lays there for a while longer, not really staring at the ceiling, not really staring at anything, before she sits up. 

“I’m gonna go see mom,” she explains when Isak looks at her. He nods. “You good?” Isak nods again. He hasn’t really said anything. She gets to her feet and pads down the hall.

She pushes the door open to find her mom in bed, looking too small under the thick white duvet Lea’s slept under herself too many times to count, when she was small and she needed the warmth of her mamma’s hand holding hers under the covers to finally drift asleep. The bed’s always been big, always ready to swallow Lea deep down into it, between the pillows and under the duvet, but it’s never looked any bigger than it does now. 

It’s kind of ironic, Lea thinks, standing at the door to the room, that her mom and Isak are both tucked away in their beds, not able to face the world. Unlike Isak, their mom doesn’t stir when Lea enters the room. She’s completely asleep, passed over into her own world. Lea isn’t an expert on her mother’s illness, not by any means, but she knows it’s gotten steadily more severe as the years go on. She’s different every time Lea comes back from London. She doesn’t know who to expect. This is the newest version of her mother, the most recently updated. And clearly, it’s gotten to the point that their father doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. 

Lea remembers when she and her dad were close, remembers what felt like years ago now. What _was_ years ago, now. They would go for breakfast on weekends, usually just the two of them going on adventures into the city, sometimes with Isak in tow. He would make them dinner, sometimes just because it was his turn, or because their mom was busy that night, and it would turn into some big production: him finding a recipe online and making something foreign and new with a tea towel thrown over his shoulder. But they were never _close,_ not really. They talked about the music Lea was listening to or about which recipe for peanut sauce for the salad rolls they’d had the night before were better, always superficial and never really meaning anything. 

It was a normal father-daughter relationship, Lea had always thought. And she’s not really surprised that her dad left, because he never really felt like someone that would _stay._ He’s been good and kind and everything he’d ever needed to be, but never someone who would stick through something. And this has just proved it. 

Lea leaves the room without even talking to her mother, closing the door softly behind her. The door to Lea’s old room is closed, too, which makes sense considering she hasn’t been here since the summer. The room looks the same as it did in July, bed stripped and desk empty except for a couple piles of things Lea’d never bothered to get rid of. There’re books she’d left behind, because it didn’t really make sense to lug a bunch of books — a weird collection of Norwegian and English — to London. Still doesn’t make sense, so they stay here, until Lea is living somewhere longer than two semesters of university. 

That’s another question Lea doesn’t want to ask herself. Not the what she’ll do after university question — not that she particularly wants to answer that one either — but the _where_ she’ll be after she’s finished her degree. She thought it would be London when she first moved; big and bustling London, busy with everything in the world. There could be a career there for her, maybe, when she finished school. And Lea loves London, she does. She would jump at the opportunity to work and live there. 

Maybe it’s only because she’s lived there barely a year, but Lea doesn’t want to tie herself there yet. There are other places, other adventures she has yet to have.

.

The kitchen is empty, Lea learns as soon as she’s made her way down there. Which doesn’t come as a huge surprise, really, because Lea is pretty sure neither Isak or their mom has left the house in the last few days. So she sends Isak a text that she’s gone to get food and grabs the keys to the car. 

It’s almost surreal driving through what used to be Lea’s neighbourhood. Half of it is the driving, which is something she never does in London. Getting behind the wheel and doing up her seatbelt and all of those mechanical movements is comforting, almost, distantly. They’re comforting the same way maneuvering up and down hills and around corners of her old neighbourhood is. She goes past the houses of people she used to know, used to be close with. It should be weird, but it’s really not. Everything is familiar, everything is the same. 

She’s back at the house an hour later with some stuff to make dinner and her mom is on the sofa. She looks dead on her feet, wrapped in the biggest sweater Lea’s ever seen. Her hair is greasy and pulled back at the nape of her neck. The skin under her eyes is almost purple. 

_“Mom.”_ Lea sets the bag of groceries down on the floor when she sees her and moves to sit beside her. “Mom, how are you?” 

“Not so good,” she says, her voice scratchy. She smiles a bit at Lea when she says, it though, and Lea pulls her mom into her, so her head is tucked under Lea’s chin. It’s an odd reversal of when Lea was smaller, and she used to sit curled up like this. “Isak said you’d come, and I wanted—”

“I know, mom.” They sit like that for a little while more, Lea smoothing her hands up her mom’s side, until Lea decides it’s time to get up. She should deal with the groceries, at least, and see if Isak is still in bed. Check if Scott’s texted. She leaves her mom on the sofa and takes the bag of food to the kitchen, methodically sorting everything into the same places they’ve been found her entire life. Pasta goes in the cupboard to the left of the fridge, canned tomatoes go down in the corner. Bread goes in the basket on the counter. The red wine (for the pasta sauce Lea is making, though she does fill up half a glass for herself) goes above the fridge. 

Lea finds Isak sitting up in bed when she goes upstairs again. She leans against the doorframe and thinks for a second about what she wants to say. She settles on “Hey.”

Isak looks up. He’s got his phone in his hand, open to messenger. Probably Jonas, Lea thinks.

“I got stuff to make dinner,” Lea explains. “You wanna help?” 

“Yeah,” Isak says. He turns his phone off, sets it down on the bed beside him. “Yeah, sure.” 

Dinner is easy. It’s tomato sauce and pasta and salad, and for a few moments, it’s like everything is how it was again. Isak and Lea making dinner, water in a pot to boil for penne noodles on the stove. But their dad isn’t coming home to join them, and their mom isn’t moving from the sofa. 

When the sauce is done simmering and the noodles have cooked, Lea lets Isak ladle out a bowl for himself, and ladles out a small bowl for herself and for her mother. She presses the bowl into her mother’s hands, and she says thank you and smiles, barely, briefly. 

Isak and Lea sit on either side of her on the sofa and eat their food, pretending not to watch their mother between them but both of them do anyway. Both of them notice how she sits the bowl down on the coffee table after a few bites, but neither say anything. 

.

It doesn’t make any sense to Lea. 

It doesn’t make any sense how she can go get on a plane and pretend like this whole… this whole _thing_ isn’t happening. How she can land in London and go back to her flat and her friends and go to class the next morning. 

She’s in a kind of daze the whole flight, but Isak promised he would be okay on his own, and that he would call or text or something if he needed anything. And he’s got Jonas and Eva, (though his face darkened at the mention of those two) so who else does he need? 

Lea comes back for Christmas that year and it’s awful. It’s not that bad, really, looking back at it, but everything is messy and new and none of them know how they’re supposed to do this family thing when they’re not a family anymore. Or, they are, sort of. Never when it counts, though.

Christmas doesn’t work and Lea goes out to a party with Ole and Thea — her best friends from high school — on New Year’s Eve and drinks too much white wine and laughs too much and leans too heavily on Thea’s shoulder. She wants to indulge and turn her head and kiss her but Lea’s drunk and she hasn’t felt that way about Thea in months.

Her mom keeps up a charade of being okay well enough, but Lea knows from Isak that their mom doesn’t leave her bed for days after Lea goes back to London.

.

Lea hugs Isak goodbye and goes back to London again but she doesn't forget. She calls him more, sometimes every night. She texts him regularly. She's the first (and only, she suspects) to know when Isak's started sleeping in the basement of some UiO student's apartment, the first to know when he officially moves in. Isak is all alone, and Lea is the only one in his corner. The only one he’s letting in. 

And even then, he’s keeping her at arm’s length. Jonas too, it looks like. Lea’s gotten a text from an unknown Oslo area code that turned out to be Jonas, saying he got her number from Isak’s phone, asking if she knows anything, if there’s anything he can do. She can’t tell him that much; Isak never told her how exactly he met this UiO student. She knows their dad is giving him money to pay rent and that he hasn’t talked to either parent for a while, only texting their dad back when he has too and avoiding their mom altogether. 

Sometimes, late on a Tuesday night or the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, Isak will call Lea. It doesn’t happen all too often, because Isak says he’s doing good, doing great. It starts out awkward, stilted, searching to find something to talk about until they’re not and it’s working and maybe Lea’s helping Isak out with some lit essay he has to write, or Isak’s trying to explain whatever’s on his next chemistry exam because _teaching it someone else is the best way to learn, okay, and Jonas doesn’t give a shit about chemistry._ They make it work. They kind of have to, considering they’re each other’s only siblings and their parents are mixed up in their own little world that involves Lea and Isak only sometimes. 

They’re long-distance siblings, without the desire to talk at all hours of the day because, despite everything, they’re only brother and sister. They’re in this whole divorce thing together, this whole mom-spends-several-days-at-a-time-in-bed thing. Though, sometimes, Lea feels like she’s running away. She’s able to get on a plane and go back to London, go back to the life she’s built for herself there, while Isak is stuck in Oslo dealing with whatever’s happening with their mom and dealing with whatever he’s dealing with in his own life. 

Lea doesn’t regret her decision to move, not really, but there are moments when she feels bad about it. 

.

Lea splits her summer between Oslo and London. She’s found a job that’s not half bad and pays pretty well in London, so she spends most of her time working like crazy and socking away as much money as she can. It’d make more sense to go back to Oslo and live at home while working somewhere, but she doesn’t really have anywhere to go there. There’s her mom’s house, yeah, but there’s also a reason Isak moved out. 

So London it is. Scott’s parents have offered her their guest bedroom, and she gratefully accepts. They don’t let her pay rent or anything, even cooking for her, so all Lea has to pay for are her lunches and her train tickets. Scott’s there too, of course. They take the train into the city together some days, when their work schedules line up. They talk and talk and line up a flat to live in next year with Tilly, who turned out to be hilarious and witty and sarcastic and the perfect addition to Lea and Scott's duo. 

And Lea books a trip back to Oslo at the end of the summer. She tells both her parents — separately, of course, she’d learned her lesson after the disaster of Christmas of 2015 — and her dad tells her he’d like to go for coffee, and her mom asks if she’d like to say in her old room. Lea declines. She’s already made plans to stay with Isak downtown and it’s easier to meet up with friends if she’s already in the city, but she makes sure her mom knows she’s going to visit. 

The trip is good. She sleeps on the sofa and Eskild and Linn are great, and Isak takes her out to all their old haunts, she goes out with Eskild once or twice and she practices her secret handshake with Jonas. (It’s not like Lea and Jonas are close or anything, but there’s some kind of understanding between them that it’s kind of their job to watch out for Isak and to make sure he’s doing okay. It’s an old and unmentioned agreement.) 

Lea and Ole and Thea pile into some hole in the wall cafe in Grünerløkka and it’s weird because she doesn’t really recognize the way Ole’s hair has grown out or how he talks about his boyfriend, and she doesn’t know when Thea has ever spoken this loud when she isn’t drunk. It’s awkward until Ole’s recounting some stupid stunt the three of them had pulled when they were eighteen and they felt like they could rule the world if they wanted to, and Lea is hiding her face in her hands and Thea can’t stop laughing, and they’re okay again and Oslo doesn’t feel so far away. 

It’s kind of strange seeing Thea now, with what feels like years between them. Lea remembers high school, remembers those feelings that were so completely filling and overpowering that Lea didn’t know how she would ever survive it. And here she is now — happy and bi and living in London, but she’s not aching with a want, no, a _need_ to kiss her best friend. She doesn’t need to anymore. Lea had never told anyone about that, but she’s tempted to now. 

The night is getting to her. It’s late and Lea’s feeling looser and pliant, and the cafe is packed with people, their heat almost oppressive. Lea knows her cheeks have gone pink. It's safe in their little corner, Ole and Thea and Lea, secluded from everyone else. Ole starts talking about the guys he had secret crushes on in high school and then, before Lea can shut up, she’s saying, “Oh my god, Thea, I had the _hugest_ crush on you when we were 17.” 

Thea laughs and her cheeks colour in that pretty, splotchy way they do (Lea high fives herself internally for not having a mini freak out over that) and she goes, “Are you serious?” 

Lea nods, because she’s serious, of _course_ she’s serious, she spent a good three-ish years daydreaming about holding hands with this girl she spent every second of every day with, it was _awful —_ so of course she’s serious. 

“I liked you too,” — Lea laughs out loud at this — “Lea, I’m _serious!”_ Thea just looks at her from where she’s sitting across the table, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. “Since we started high school.” 

Lea lets her head drop on the table, hard. She hears Ole laughing distantly, and she shoves him with her elbow. 

That’s a thought, though, oh _god._ Lea can’t help but take a second to sink into it, to think about how everything would have gone down if Thea and her had worked everything out then instead of now, years after, when Lea is living a sea away and Thea is doing whatever she’s doing, going to school and working at a furniture shop when classes are over for the day and it’s already dark outside. 

But this is bringing back every sharp pain from high school, every imagined moment, every daydream. They’re duller now, though; gone callous, buried themselves into her skin. Only memories she can recall, not ones she can relive. 

They stay late at the cafe before saying their goodbyes and squeezing each other tight, making promises to see each other when Lea's back for Christmas. Thea gives Lea a soft smile that still, despite everything, makes Lea’s stomach flip. Lea leans into her and presses a quick kiss to her cheek in return.

.

Lea isn’t a liar either. She has coffee with her dad that never moves out of the awkward stage, and she shows up at her mom’s with all the ingredients to make the cookies they used to make when she was little and Isak wasn’t allowed to be in the kitchen because he just pushed bags of flour and sugar off the counter. They make cookies and they talk and Lea tells her about London and school and Scott and how she’s doing and her mom nods and tells Lea that she should be careful, and asks if she reads the Bible or has gone to church. Lea’s heart falls a little. But the cookies come out okay and Lea takes some with her when she leaves.

And Isak’s good too, he is, but there’s something missing. Something’s closed off.

Lea gets it, she does — the divorced parents and moved-out-at-16 thing, it's tough. But she can tell there’s something else going on, too. It’s not as though they’re the kind of siblings who tell each other everything, but they’re close enough that Lea can tell that whatever has Isak feeling like this has nothing to do with their mom or their dad. And Lea won’t force him to tell her. She doesn’t have that right. All she can do is wait and watch and be patient, hoping that he either reaches out — to her, or Jonas, or anyone — or that it sorts itself out. 

Eskild’s the one who tips her off. They’re in the kitchen one night, leaning up against the counter and drinking tea. Lea’s just poured a shot of Bailey’s into her chai when Eskild moves a little closer and tips his head forward and into Lea’s personal spaces and goes, “So, Isak.”

The Isak in question has gone to bed hours ago, but Lea’s still a bit apprehensive. Understandably — Eskild is well-intentioned, but Lea’s heard enough stories by now to know he’s nosy. “Isak.” 

Eskild lets his head fall to one side and pulls his bottom lip into his mouth, considering his next words. “Has he…” Eskild trails off, taking a few more moments to put his thoughts together. He flips his head to the other side and starts again. “Has he told you much about how we met?” 

Lea shrugs. “You met at a party, right? And he got drunk and didn’t want to go home, so you brought him here.” She shrugs again. End of story.

Silence. Eskild’s nodding slowly. Thinking. _“Okay.”_ He breathes in once, holds it. “He hasn’t told you we met at a gay bar, then.” 

“What? No.” Lea frowns. “Why a gay bar?” 

Eskild levels her a look.

And _wow._ That’s something she’s never considered. Never even thought of. Never even began to cross her mind. “Are you… sure?”

“No!” Eskild breathes out a laugh. “I could be very, _very,_ wrong. Noora and Eva came into some… information or something in the spring and got me to flirt with him and he was, like, super not into it. But straight people don’t really end up in gay bars on Thursday nights, you know?” 

“Yeah. I mean, _yeah.”_ Lea takes a sip of her tea, just to have something to do. It’s too hot and it scalds her tongue. “I just don’t know what to say.” 

“Is this seriously such a foreign concept to you?” 

“No! I’m bi, actually, so I… I get some of it. It just never really occurred to me before.” And it hadn’t. Lea had panicked about her sexuality quietly and alone, listening to a lot of Jens Lekman and Sufjan Stevens and Tegan and Sara and writing in her journal every night. 

“Have you told him that?”  


“That I’m bi? No. It never really… came up.”

“You should tell him! I’m serious. Before you take off to London.” Eskild makes a shooing motion with his hand. 

Lea nods. “I think I will. And even if he’s not… you know, then at least he knows about me.”

“Exactly.”

“Why did you tell me, anyway? If you don’t know?”

Eskild maneuvers so he’s leaning back on two hands on the counter instead of one. He glances at Lea before shifting his gaze to the stained kitchen ceiling. “I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened with your parents, but I don’t think that whatever happened helped him with, like, getting in touch with his feelings. I care about him and I know you care about him, and I think the best way for us to help him is to be a bit nosy. Like, I’m telling you this trusting you’re not going to tell anyone, including Isak, so that you know what’s going on and you’re able to help him the best you can.”

Lea is a bit taken aback. “That’s like… obscenely thoughtful.” 

Eskild turns to look at her again, smiling. “That’s what I do best.”

.

Procrastination has always been one of Lea’s talents. It doesn’t matter what she’s supposed to do: finish a paper, text someone back, clean up dirty dishes. Tell her younger brother she’s not straight. 

Though, she always gets things done and handed in by the deadline. Barely. Which is why she’s cornered Isak in his room the night before she’s going back to London. Lea has to swallow against her insides rising in her throat when she says, finally, forcing herself to look at Isak, “I like girls.” 

The words finagle their way out of her on a single rushed exhale, faster than she’d meant to. But they’re still there. 

Isak’s eyebrows draw together. His head drops down, his gaze following it. Moments pass, and Isak looks up, and frowns. “You’re gay?” 

Lea shakes her head. “I’m bi.” 

Something barely perceptible melts Isak’s features, softening them into something younger, something curious, something — no, some _one_ — else. 

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “You are?” Lea nods. There are a handful more moments of silence. “How did you…” Isak pauses, his tongue darting out over his lips and then back in again. “How did you know?” 

“You remember Thea? My best friend in high school?” 

Isak nods, once, slow. “I remember her.” 

“I had the biggest—” Lea pauses, trying to condense what she felt into something she can explain in a couple of words. It felt like more than a crush, back then. Felt more consuming in how it took up every single second of every single day, how her thoughts always circled back to this one girl, to her best friend. It felt like her entire world revolved around this girl“I was basically in love with her.” 

“You were?” Isak looks almost confused. Or maybe curious. 

“I was. Are you… okay with that?” 

“Yeah,” Isak swallows, once. “I’m okay. It’s just… I didn’t know.” 

“You didn’t. I never thought to tell you. And I’m sorry.” Lea is sorry, she really is. 

Isak shakes his head. “No, Lea, I’m serious, it’s fine. There’s so much…” he pauses, coughs once, searching for the right word. “There’s so much stuff happening with mom and dad, and you being in London, I get you not telling me. It’s all good. No stress.” 

“Okay. Okay. No stress. We’re good?”

“We’re good.” Isak nods. 

And there’s that, done. Not so bad. Lea feels like she could come out a thousand more times, like she could yell it from the rooftops. 

“Okay. Awesome. Sibling bonding time over.” Lea slides into one of the chairs at the table. “I think Scott might come here for Christmas this year.” 

“Scott? That guy from London?”

Lea nods. 

“Are you guys, like, together?”

_“No,”_ Lea says. “We’re just friends.”

Isak’s grinning now. “You keep telling yourself that, Lea.” 

“Oh, fuck you. Guys and girls can be friends," Lea insists. "Aren’t you friends with Eva?” 

Isak’s grin falters, for half a second. “Yeah, I guess so.” 

They sit in companionable silence for a minute or two. Then, Lea says, “Are you going to come to the airport with me tomorrow?”

Isak glances at her. “What time?”

“I have to be there at eight.” 

Isak makes a face, and Lea laughs.

“Yeah, I thought so.” 

“I’ll get up, though, to say bye.” Lea raises her eyebrows at him. “I will! I’ll set an alarm, even.” 

“We can do goodbyes tonight. Just to be safe.”

“We can, but we don’t need to. I’ll be up.” 

“Think of this as like… an insurance goodbye.” 

Isak looks at her admonishingly, but he allows her insurance goodbye anyway. They both stand up and embrace each other. 

Lea says “Goodnight,” and Isak says “I’ll see you in the morning,” and they part ways for the night.

.

Isak beats all the odds and wanders into the kitchen a good fifteen minutes before Lea has to leave. The hair on the back of his head is standing straight up and he’s in a hoodie over his boxers. The poor kid’s eyes are barely open and Lea has no idea how he manages to move as fast as he does towards the coffee without running into anything. 

He pours himself a cup and doctors it up before collapsing into the chair opposite Lea. He takes a sip of his coffee before putting his arms up on the table and burying his face in them. 

“Did you have a shower last night?” Lea woke up enough last night to register someone sneaking into the shower at the truly horrifying hour of three thirty in the morning, and if the way Isak’s hair is sticking up, she would hazard a guess that he went to bed with wet hair 

Isak doesn’t answer right away. He picks his head up off his arms and pulls his hood up. “I couldn’t sleep, and it helps sometimes.” 

Lea hates how this is an admission. Hates how she didn’t even have to ask straight out. Hates how rough and weak and tired Isak’s voice is. “You should go back to sleep,” she says, soft as she can. 

Lea hates how Isak shakes his head. How he says, “I can’t.” 

God, how long as this been going for? Of course there’s something missing, of course he’s miserable, he’s _not sleeping._

“I’ll come to the airport with you,” Isak says. “I’m not going to go back to sleep.”

“No, no, Isak, you’re not coming. You slept for what, three hours? Less than that? You should lie down or something.”

He shakes his head again, vehemently this time. His eyes are closed. “I can’t go back in there, now, Lea, and pretend I’m going to sleep when I’m not.” He spits out the last words. 

“You can come,” Lea says, quickly before she changes her mind. “But we’re leaving right now and I’m buying you another coffee when we get there.” 

With that, Isak stands up. He downs the rest of his coffee and, without saying a word, staggers out of the kitchen and in the direction of his room. He’s back a handful of minutes later with jeans pulled on over his boxers and a hat over his hair. Lea stands up, deposits hers and Isak’s coffee cups into the sink and grabs her bag. Isak locks the door behind them when they leave and they make their way to the tram station. 

It’s a ways to the airport, and Isak dozes off as soon as the train starts moving, his head hanging forward at an angle that’s going to make his neck hurt like a bitch later. Lea pulls him over so his head is on her shoulder instead, and she spends the rest of the trip watching the sun moving over Oslo. 

Isak wakes up on his own when they get to the airport. He stirs, pressing his face into Lea’s shoulder like a little kid, before letting out the smallest groan and sitting up. There’s a red mark on his face from sleeping with his face pressed up against Lea’s jacket, and his eyes have gone all squinty. “I fell asleep.”

Lea nods. “You did.” She stands up and slings her backpack on, waiting for Isak to stand up too, before making her way off and into the terminal. At the first place she sees selling coffee, she goes and gets Isak a latte. He makes a face when she hands it to him.

“I don’t drink these,” he says, holding it away from his body like it’s poison. 

“Come on, Isak, these things put me right to sleep.” It’s true, for some reason. Anything steamed milk makes Lea’s eyes glaze over with exhaustion, makes her want to lay down wherever she is and close her eyes for a couple minutes. 

They’ve gotten to the airport in good time, so they wander over to where the line for security starts. There’s plenty of time until Lea’s flight boards, so they don’t need to rush their goodbye. Here, it’s lazy and unhurried, both of them more awake and alive than they were earlier. Lea pulls Isak into a tight hug. Isak hugs her back with one arm, the other holding his latte at a safe distance away from their bodies. 

“I’ll see you at Christmas,” Lea says when they separate. 

Isak nods. “Yeah.” 

“Can I have a sip of your latte before I have to go?” Isak laughs and passes it to her. Lea takes a sip, closes her eyes for half a second, remembers how much better espresso is than straight coffee. Passes it back to Isak. “You can tell me if you need anything. If you want to talk about mom and dad or whatever.”

“I will.” He sniffs, and drags his hand across his nose. “Good luck with school.” 

“Try and sleep.”

“I’ll try.” 

God, Lea hopes so. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and stick around for part 2!! Even is in it, he's his charming self, Scott tries to speak Norwegian, I think there's some abba in it somewhere. 
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://emkayss.tumblr.com/) and bug me about actually finishing chapter 2 and to finally write wlw skam fic. 
> 
> reblogs of this fic [(post can be found here!)](http://emkayss.tumblr.com/post/167470246301/lean-back-now-lean-back-and-breathe-part-i) are very much appreciated ❤️❤️❤️


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